What is Live Time Assessment and Continuous Feedback?

“Feedback is most useful for students when it is direct, individually focussed and provided immediately. Live-time assessment is designed to support this feedback process so that it most impacts student learning.”

Mike Olynyk , MYP Science Coordinator and Teacher at Mulgrave School

Traditional school reports are retrospective, providing parents with information on their child’s past performance. Often diplomatically worded, they do not always give an accurate picture of how a student is performing. Instead of drawing on formative assessment to improve future learning, these reports are static without meaningful next steps for development.

Even schools who do provide high quality feedback to their students often do so without involving parents. By missing this step, students are missing the opportunity for holistic support that can be provided by families and schools working together.

Live Time Assessment provides an exciting alternative to traditional reports that provides real-time feedback. Drawing on assessment for learning strategies, the traditional report format is replaced by regular updates on progress. Feedback is transparent, high quality, and makes progress visible.

Using free, web-based applications to create a live time feedback folder, teachers write assessments which are shared with students and parents at regular points throughout the year. Parents are able to see progress and growth in real time and students are clear how they can improve their own learning. Using Google Spreadsheets, parents can be informed everytime the sheet changes through email notification.

Changing the way schools shares progress with parents has improved communication between home and school. Parents get a clear, up to date picture of their child’s progress. Meetings between parents and teachers are more meaningful as they are based on up to date information. When surveyed halfway through the pilot, approximately 80% of parents felt that the feedback folder was helpful for understanding their child’s progress.

As targets and next steps are made clear through honest communication from teachers, parents find it easier to become a partner in learning. Feedback on particular assignments is transparent and specific to their child enabling parents to offer targeted support.

Students are better able to articulate their learning and identify their own next steps for learning. As a result, student self confidence and intrinsic motivation for learning has increased. Rather than being compared to peers, their trajectory of progress is individual.

The Live Time Assessment tool is very easy to use but it does require a commitment to consistency between teachers as inconsistencies in approach become very visible to parents. Students need to be able to have a certain level of writing or typing skills to allow them to write and update their own targets.

This innovation is for the whole school community and typically takes 6-12 months for implementation. Teachers will require time, access to the internet, and GSuite tools.

HundrED Criteria

innovativeness

impact

scalability

This innovation challenges the way schools communicate with parents in a more meaningful way than the traditional school report which presents a manicured, retrospective view of a student’s past learning.

Parents have found that they feel more involved in their children's learning while students feel a greater sense of ownership over their academic journey. Teachers have found that their students benefit from the experience.

This is currently being used in one Canadian high school but the model is highly applicable to a range of schooling contexts regardless of curriculum. Language is not a barrier as it can be easily adapted. Innovators have attended International Baccalaureate global conference in Japan to present their Live Assessment.